The Politics of Home examines the changing representations of "home" in twentieth-century English literature. Examining imperial fiction, contemporary literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial narratives on belonging, exile and immigration, Rosemary Marangoly George argues that literary allegiances are always more complicated than expected and yet curiously visible in textual reformulations of "home." She reads English women's narration of their success in the empire against Joseph Conrad's accounts of colonial masculine failure, R. K. Narayan alongside Frederic Jameson, contemporary Indian women writers as they recycle the rhetoric of the British Romantic poets, Edward Said next to M. G. Vassanji and Jamaica Kincaid, and Conrad through Naipaul and Ishiguro.

Rosemary Marangoly George is Assistant Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego, and the editor of Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity (1998).

"In its sustained intertextuality and its ability to take propositions and turn them around in order to generate a productive unease, The Politics of Home is an intellectually stimulating and absorbing reconfiguration of postcolonial cultural studies."—Aparajita Sagar, Diaspora

"[This work is] at once radical in its inclusivity and suggestive of a whole new way of conceptualizing 'metropolitan' and 'colonial' literary traditions. The fact that this revision is not contingent on East/West, first/third, or home/away divides is evidence of its challenge to the geographical notation that has typically underwritten western imperial culture, and marks George as an important voice in refiguring debates about the canon and its relationship to a variety of imperial histories."—Antoinette Burton, Social History

"A groundbreaking move beyond the first generation of postcolonial criticism."—Nancy Armstrong, Brown University